2010–2013: BAWAG CONTEMPORARY
Marcel van Eeden
Celia
2/12/2010—30/1/2011
Marcel van Eeden, born in The Hague in 1965, ranks among today’s most important draftsmen in the international arena. BAWAG Contemporary is pleased to be able to present his work as the first institution in Austria.
Van Eeden’s comprehensive series of pictures combine real and fictitious biographies to reconstruct chapters of contemporary history from the 1920s to the 1960s. Since 1993, the artist makes at least one drawing a day which he incorporates in his steadily growing cycles. His drawings, mostly black and white and made with a Negro Pencil, are based on magazines or photographs and texts all of which date from before 1965, the year he was born. The artist never goes for historically important events, but chooses everyday places or trite situations. His works are characterized by a film-noir-like quality that springs from the photorealism of his representations and the way he relies on black-and white contrasts.
The exhibition presents van Eeden’s cycle of pictures Celia, which comprises 148 sheets accompanied by continuing text excerpts. Celia begins with passages from Robert Walser’s Der Spaziergang (The Walk, 1917) and merges into a fragment from T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (1949). This is followed by excerpts from the confidence trickster Jack Bilbo’s Autobiography (The First Forty Years of the Complete and Intimate Life Story of an Artist, Author, Sculptor, Art Dealer, Philosopher, Psychologist, Traveller, and a Modernist Fighter for Humanity, 1948) and, again, from Robert Walser’s Der Spaziergang. Van Eeden has rounded off the series with quotations from Laatste dagen (Last Days, 1927), a work by the Dutch author J. van Oudshoorn.
Pictures and texts, places and figures are combined in such a playful and at the same time analytical way that a first examination of the work leaves only a vague idea of the entire work. The pictures do not render some great meaningful narrative but seem to depict mental processes such as recollections, dreams, ideas, and hallucinations rather which stand side by side without any connection with each other. A story unfolds which remaps the past and muddles the flow of time. The observer comes upon architectural views, landscapes, and pictures of cities and people in unspectacular situations besides catastrophes, accidents, and explosions. Van Eeden’s works incorporate individual objects like pistols and cakes and, again and again, relate to art.
Marcel van Eeden has made a name for himself with his extensive series The Life and Work of K. M. Wiegand (2005/2006) at the 4th Berlin Biennale in 2006. Further series like Celia (2004–2006) or The Archaeologist. The Travels of Oswald Sollmann (2007) have proved to be essential contributions to his complex oeuvre. In his more recent series Witness for the Prosecution (2008–2009) van Eeden assembles his former works’ protagonists.Marcel van Eeden lives and works in Zurich and The Hague.
Curator: Christine Kintisch
Press: Christina Werner
Van Eeden’s comprehensive series of pictures combine real and fictitious biographies to reconstruct chapters of contemporary history from the 1920s to the 1960s. Since 1993, the artist makes at least one drawing a day which he incorporates in his steadily growing cycles. His drawings, mostly black and white and made with a Negro Pencil, are based on magazines or photographs and texts all of which date from before 1965, the year he was born. The artist never goes for historically important events, but chooses everyday places or trite situations. His works are characterized by a film-noir-like quality that springs from the photorealism of his representations and the way he relies on black-and white contrasts.
The exhibition presents van Eeden’s cycle of pictures Celia, which comprises 148 sheets accompanied by continuing text excerpts. Celia begins with passages from Robert Walser’s Der Spaziergang (The Walk, 1917) and merges into a fragment from T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (1949). This is followed by excerpts from the confidence trickster Jack Bilbo’s Autobiography (The First Forty Years of the Complete and Intimate Life Story of an Artist, Author, Sculptor, Art Dealer, Philosopher, Psychologist, Traveller, and a Modernist Fighter for Humanity, 1948) and, again, from Robert Walser’s Der Spaziergang. Van Eeden has rounded off the series with quotations from Laatste dagen (Last Days, 1927), a work by the Dutch author J. van Oudshoorn.
Pictures and texts, places and figures are combined in such a playful and at the same time analytical way that a first examination of the work leaves only a vague idea of the entire work. The pictures do not render some great meaningful narrative but seem to depict mental processes such as recollections, dreams, ideas, and hallucinations rather which stand side by side without any connection with each other. A story unfolds which remaps the past and muddles the flow of time. The observer comes upon architectural views, landscapes, and pictures of cities and people in unspectacular situations besides catastrophes, accidents, and explosions. Van Eeden’s works incorporate individual objects like pistols and cakes and, again and again, relate to art.
Marcel van Eeden has made a name for himself with his extensive series The Life and Work of K. M. Wiegand (2005/2006) at the 4th Berlin Biennale in 2006. Further series like Celia (2004–2006) or The Archaeologist. The Travels of Oswald Sollmann (2007) have proved to be essential contributions to his complex oeuvre. In his more recent series Witness for the Prosecution (2008–2009) van Eeden assembles his former works’ protagonists.Marcel van Eeden lives and works in Zurich and The Hague.
Curator: Christine Kintisch
Press: Christina Werner